Must-Read Poetry: Summer 2023

July

So to Speak by Terrance Hayes

Whether in free verse or in sonnets, Hayes builds energy in his poems through recursive language and inversion of phrases. This method is quite successful, imbuing a dually playful and disarming sense to his work. “Ladies & Gentleman put your hands together / for ’s beautifully iambic name,” he begins a poem early in the collection. “Do not think of all the tall in him / squeezing into a stall at the mall as strange. // Some days his father whispered to himself / Someday that boy’s going to change his name.” His tonal shifts pierce the page; whimsy is appended with sentiment, as in “American Sonnet for My Grandfather’s Love Child”: “My mother changed her name / To daughter, then to sister, then back to mother again.” The same gentleness arises in “Blood Pressure Medicine”: “that terminal quiet / between hearing her // close the door of the bathroom / and open the bathroom mirror.” Admirers of Hayes can spend their summer shifting and his simultaneously released book of prose, . There Hayes examines his poetic lineage through divergent prose forms (lists, short profiles, questionnaires, journal entries, imagined blog posts). This is a wildly entertaining and honest view into a poet and artist’s rangy mind.